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I might actually buy that game. It looks really good! Not sure if it should be a $50 though. That was my problem with the Wario game. I'm not sure if I'd pay full price for a 2D game especially when there are a lot of great 2D games on the DS for $30.

UT3 Titan pack, and Patch out now. Downloaded them, and wow. The UI got a MAJOR overhaul, Game performance got a massive boost, haven't tried the new modes yet, but so far mostly positive buzz. If you have it on PC or PS3 You definitely need to download this.

Also Nvidia dropped a new wave of drivers today, even if you don't play games on your computer you should still keep your drivers current.

Some screens from the latest UT3 update

New Title Screen

Fixed UI

ACHIEVEMENTS!

Titan Mutator!

With the new Titan Mutator, after you kill so many opponents you can turn into a giant sized character, who is a lot more powerful for a limited time.
But there can be several Titans running around at the same time. It's out there, but it's a lot of fun, and adds yet another dynamic. It's useable in ANY gametype. Remember these new additions are for the PC, AND PS3 editions.
The 360 version is belated because Microsoft won't allow such a large download over Live.

Also Steam has a deal on the game. You can play the full game for free for two days, after that you can pay a $12 fee to own it

Last edited by TheDeviot; March 5, 2009 at 11:21pm.
Reason: Automerged Doublepost

The Deviot
-------------------------
"No matter how hot you think they are, Someone. Somewhere. Is tired of their crap."

But there can be several Titans running around at the same time. It's out there, but it's a lot of fun, and adds yet another dynamic. It's useable in ANY gametype. Remember these new additions are for the PC, AND PS3 editions.

The 360 version is belated because Microsoft won't allow such a large download over Live.

Also Steam has a deal on the game. You can play the full game for free for two days, after that you can pay a $12 fee to own it

That is pretty cool, and for those wanting it for the PS3 its still at many Targets for $13.98-19.98 on the clearance aisle

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Yeah the 360 also has more quality games, the PS3 is still having trouble establishing its own IP's due to the fact many are not buying it because of price

I think IronAvatar would be able to explain the whole 720/1080 disparity, its strange though because just looking at what little I own, Mortal Kombat vs DC and Metal Gear Solid 4 are both 1080p games so its not like the system can't do it

Did somebody say my name? Hold on, because this post is a bit number-heavy,

The biggest issue with the PS3, rendering wise, is that the GPU is severely underclocked compared to the 360, not to mention a video memory fill rate that is half of the that on PS2! So basically, there are two limitations graphics wise that spoil an otherwise great design.

The main issue is that in a complex scene, a pixel is typically rendered more than once. So, think of the really complex lighting equations used for say, normal mapping....that's a lot of shader instructions just for one pixel. Then imagine that one pixel being rendered a 30 or 40 times over...that's a lot of shader instructions and VRAM read & writes!

Now multiply that a by a third of 1080p resolution....that's 1,036,800 pixels that are rendered maybe 30 to 40 times. Say there's maybe 200 shader instructions being executed per pixel, so you end up with 8,294,400,000 of those being performed each frame. At a rough estimate for texture reads (normal, colour, specular) that's around 497,664,000 bytes or 474 megabytes of data being read from VRAM in a 60th of second.

It's easy to see what kind of brick walls you encounter with only 20GB/s of bandwidth and a relatively slow GPU. The memory bandwidth isn't so bad, but you have to remember that you're not really reading that data one bit after another....you're only reading a little bit and then waiting as some shader instructions are executed. Also, on-chip caching helps to a degree too.

Luckily, there is a way around that sort of thing. The easiest solution, is to perform the lighting equation for each pixel, only once. Now, you could some up with all sorts of fancy sorting but there's a method called "Deferred Shading" that limits the number of shader instructions. This is the rendering method used on Killzone 2 and LBP.

It's a great method that, while it doesn't limit the amount of VRAM being read, it limits the total amount of shader instructions for our test case to be 414,720,000. This is a HUGE improvement compared to our figure of 8,294,400,000 instructions which was the only the figure for the 30% overdraw!

There are other benefits too, such as simplifying the whole lighting process. That probably brings the per-pixel instruction count down from around 200 to maybe 100, depending on how many lights you want.

So there you go... a crash course in modern rendering strategies for the PS3.

Apparently it will focus more on online play, user driven content and multiplayer, hopefully EA builds in some DLC since the SD card firmware upgrade should be out by then and WiiWare has been around for a while

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BioShock fans....

It went live last Thursday I think but has already had updates. So far, it really just poses more questions than answers about BioShock 2 - a game that I will pounce on like Battle Cat the moment its released.

Holy cow... I must have been living under a rock. I had NO IDEA that there was a Far Cry movie.

"I wouldn't be surprised if this movie has Adam as a skinny nerd from Earth battling another skinny nerd-hacker from Earth that used an alias of Keldor. They then enter Tron-style to a cyber world called Eternia, where they control muscle-bound avatars to battle (called He-Man and Skeletor). And these same avatars come to life and continue to battle in present-day Earth." - VZX

WOW! I didn't even realise RE5 is coming out on tommorrow. I picked up this game at the mall on Monday. Some shop here has been selling them since Monday. Being a RE fan I can definitely say I like it.

I was just gonna ask if anyone had heard anything of interest out of GDC yet. I know it's not typically the place for big news, with E3 a few months away, but we usually get a few tidbits, and 1 or 2 big announcements.

I was just gonna ask if anyone had heard anything of interest out of GDC yet. I know it's not typically the place for big news, with E3 a few months away, but we usually get a few tidbits, and 1 or 2 big announcements.

There have been a few things, some updates on Fat Princess, expansion to Pixel Junk Eden, some new things to develop on the 360. But everyone agrees the most news will come tomorrow and Thursday with a set of panels/presentations (Iwata on Wed and Kojima on Thursday).

And something is coming, IGN and 1Up have both said tomorrow is going to have an announcement during the Iwata keynote. Here is what Sam Kennedy said on his blog

In terms of highlights coming out of this show, I’d say Nintendo’s Iwata keynote is the one that you’ll really want to watch (Jeremy will be live blogging it tomorrow morning). I thought he was just going to be talking about Motion Plus and DSi, but it turns out he’s going to be announcing quite a few new games — for Wii, Wiiware, and Virtual Console (and this won’t just be Nintendo titles, but also third party stuff). I’ve already heard about a few of them (including one that makes me all giddy…I can’t wait for tomorrow now).

And cameras have been told they get to do the first 5 min and then must be turned off.

There have been rumors for a few weeks, everything from a new Zelda (due to some patents released last month) to a actual USB hard drive instead of just the SD card solution.

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